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The Wealth of Nations, published in 1776, is a careful, thorough, and brilliant criticism of the mercantile system that governed economic policy in Great Britain during Smith's life. Smith charts the evolution of mercantile principles from the...

Characterized by Joyce Carol Oates as the most unpretentious masterpiece of the American literary tradition, The Dollmaker is a novel by Harriete Arnow that was published in 1954 and proved to be a pathbreaking novel. This novel was nominated for...

Fly Away Peter is a book written by David Malouf in 1982. The book mainly revolves around the story of Jim Saddler who has an advanced understanding of the bird life of an estuary near his home. A man called Ashley Crowther inherits the farm which...

Angela Carter is an English novelist born on May 7, 1940 in Eastbourne, England. As a child, she was raised in a family that valued art and literature. Her father was a journalist, and she followed in his footsteps by writing for the Croydon...

Mary Wollstonecraft’s Vindication of the Rights of Woman, published in 1792, is often referred to as the founding text or manifesto of Western feminism. Nineteenth-century American feminists revered its author as their founding mother and read and...

The Book of Daniel was published in 1971 when Doctorow was a Visiting Author at the University of California, Irvine.

Doctorow conceived of the idea for the novel in the late 1960s - an era of intense conflicts over Vietnam, the Civil Rights...

Published in 2005, The Secret River is the first book in a trilogy by Kate Grenville that tackles the morally complex history of the colonization of Australia. The Secret River emerged out Grenville's research into her ancestor, Solomon Wiseman,...

Initially transcribed sometime around 1164, Erec and Enide is not just the first of the great Chivalric Romances by Chretien de Troyes, it is one of the earliest poems about King Arthur and is usually regarded as the first Arthurian work to...

Lone Star is a richly layered ensemble piece featuring a complex plot and complicated characters written and directed by John Sayles. The convoluted plot is a murder mystery in which much darker elements of political corruption are slowly revealed...

The Unredeemed Captive is a novel written by John Putnam Demos that was published in 2011. It was nominated for the National Book Award and won the Francis Parkman Prize. Demos is also a historian in addition to being an author, and he has won the...

Jennifer Finney Boylan is an American novelist and activist born on June 22, 1958 in Valley Forge, Pennsylvania. Although Boylan was born a biological male, she felt as though her natural body did not fit her true personality. It was a gnawing...

Dalton Conley was born in 1969 to income-poor parents (from middle class backgrounds) who had moved to New York's Lower East Side before the spike in drugs and crime during the following decade. The neighbourhood was poverty striken, and, with the...

An Ornithologist's Guide to Life: Stories was written by award-winning author Ann Hood. Hood is the bestselling author of The Book That Matters Most, The Knitting Circle, An Italian Wife, Comfort, and several other works. In this extraordinary...

The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo is a Swedish novel that was translated from its original language into English. It is at one level a gripping, chilling suspense novel about a crime that occurred decades before, and the naive young journalist who...

Fitzgerald’s short stories remain the broadest and most comprehensive summary and analysis of the Jazz Age. He was far more successful in his lifetime with his stories than he was with his longer fiction, and yet both have endured the test of time...

A Study in Scarlet was written in 1886 and published in Beeton's Christmas Annual in 1887 by Arthur Conan Doyle. Doyle was rejected three times by publishers; Ward, Lock, and Company finally accepted it in 1886 with the caveat of it delaying...

Stevenson conceived of the idea of Treasure Island (originally titled, "The Sea Cook: A Story for Boys") from a map of an imaginary, romantic island idly drawn by Stevenson and his stepson on a rainy day in Breamar, Scotland. Stevenson had just...

Vanity Fair was published as a series of installments, beginning in 1847. Even before all installments had been published, the work was an enormous hit. Thackeray was hailed for his realistic satire, and yet at the same time criticized for his...

Palahniuk has stated that the book was inspired by an actual fight he had while on a camping trip. He returned to work with bruises, but his co-workers never asked what had happened. This seeming reluctance to know the details of his private life...

David Pelzer, in the second of his three autobiographical books, describes his life as an adolescent who has been taken from his mother in what contemporary court documents call the worst case of child abuse in the history of California in which...

Snow in August is a novel published in 1997 and written by Pete Hamill, who is an American journalist and writer who specializes in novels and essays. Through his extensive travels all around the country and around the world, Hamill is a well...

Carl Degler is an American author born on February 6, 1921 in Newark, New Jersey. At a young age, Degler demonstrated an interest in history and literature. He attended Upsala College and earned a BA in history and later his master’s degree at...

I Am David is a children's novel written originally in Danish, the native tongue of its author Anne Holm. Holm was a journalist before turning her hand to writing a book. She wrote it because she felt that children had the capacity to love a book...